The American Scholar: The Lottery Society - William Deresiewicz - 1 views
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I think it’s great when rich people do good things with their money. I think it’s appalling that we need them to. To put it bluntly, the money that the Brins and Bloombergs have to shower down on a fortunate few—that money, and a great deal more besides—should be taxed away and allocated by democratic means.
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the problem goes beyond taxation. Markets allocate resources, but governments structure markets. Never mind that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes. (And as we know, it isn’t even that they don’t pay more than the rest of us. In a lot of cases, they pay a great deal less.) They shouldn’t be in a position to make that kind of money in the first place.
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You want to tell me that they earned it? Earned is a moral term. how do you measure the share of the money that somebody gets that they actually “earn”? From 1978 to 2011, the average worker’s pay went up by 6 percent. The average compensation of a CEO went up by 727 percent. Do you really believe that executives earned a raise that’s 120 times greater than their workers did?
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The problem is the way that wealth has come to be distributed. The share of national income that accrues to the top one percent, which had stayed at about 10 percent from 1954 to 1980, has risen to about 23 percent. In a $15 trillion economy, the difference represents a premium of almost $2 trillion a year, or more than twice the current annual federal budget deficit. As far as I’m concerned, that money belongs to the rest of us, especially the bottom 80 percent, whether in the form of increased pay or higher public spending. By manipulating the legislative and legal systems—which is to say, by buying them—the rich have simply stolen it.
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The outcome is the lottery society that’s with us now. Social mobility has slowed to a crawl. If you work hard and play by the rules, it probably won’t make a damn bit of difference